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Comment by m4r35n357 | Hacker News Reader

Real reason is buried in the text:

"While Sugar was an elegant operating system, some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows. They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of their lives, not just with the XO-1."

They bottled out of Linux, so no free OS . . . the rest is history.

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> They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of their lives

Somehow this just sounds very sad to me.

And silly because UI paradigms change anyways. And people are capable of keeping up.

True, but in my experience having worked for a school district and for a tech college, there is nothing teachers hate more in the entire world than having to revise curriculum. At the tech college, the IT instructors rewrote their curriculum every year out of necessity, but instructors in other areas were just like pretty much all the school district teachers I knew: if a button changed position they were upset because they'd have to revise their instructions that tell kids to click on the 'the third button from the left' or some such nonsense.

At overly busy tech startups where time is money, it's more than just the "hassle", it's time that takes out from doing other work. There must be screenshot automation suites out there, but the education department is often woefully understaffed, under budgeted, and near last on the list of priorities that it is a laborious, toilsome, and thankless task, often without notification to the eduction team, which results in less-than professional presentation when the first time the change is noticed is in the classroom or when a customer complains. It's no wonder that it's upsetting when things are changed!

Microsoft got a cut-down version of Windows XP to work on the XO-1. When word of that came out, lots of people were very upset at OLPC, because of how heavily they had been emphasizing the open-source aspect of the project.

IIRC, it never got farther than a tech demo, and no laptops actually shipped. It still generated bad press for the project, though.

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